The mystery of blue-tailed wolves

Here’s an unexplained bit of cuteness that has remained a huge mystery to me.

I’ve been following the WorldForge on and off. WorldForge is a project to develop open source MMORPG clients, servers and media. It’s a very slow project and a WoW killer it ain’t, but they’ve done some pretty methodical stuff and have some interesting results to show so far. Also, they’ve introduced some rather cute ideas to the world, such as the idea that you don’t need to kill wolves in games, you can just throw a bunch of sausages at them. I suppose wolves like sausages.

But they also had one other wolf-related oddity.

I ran across this interesting screenshot a long time ago.

Eh? A blue-tailed wolf!

Okay, this is just an obligatory texture test, nothing more. The funny thing is, I have no idea why this wolf model was created; I can only assume it’s just part of the WorldForge game projects like Acorn. (I wonder if people threw sausages at this blue-tailed wolf.) I certainly have no idea why specifically there are screenshots of a wolf with a blue tail out there in the world. I suppose WorldForge devs just made screenshots of blue-tailed wolves because it seemed like a cool idea at the time.

As I recall the website had some other screenshots of the same wolf 3D model with other textures. But this one tends to stick in the mind. Here we have a wolf! With a blue tail! No eyes, but maybe this guy is just having eyes closed!

I later ran into another cute screenshot of this wolfy!

Ooooo! The wolfy looks pretty happy.

I also found a VRML model that seems to have the mesh, but I haven’t found the texture, unfortunately.

This whole business with blue-tailed wolves is quite odd. It’s easily explainable as a texture text, but maybe fantasy worlds would all be so much better if they had actual blue-tailed wolves. No one would know what makes the blue-tailed wolves so different from regular wolves. They’re wolves. With blue tails.

And it’s always so refreshing to run into blue-tailed wolfies in other games, such as Torchlight II.